On Mar 26, 2008, at 6:39 AM, dhbailey wrote:
David W. Fenton wrote:
On 23 Mar 2008 at 21:55, Owain Sutton wrote:
(Why
notate anything as 2/2, if it's likely to be heard as 2/4?)
This kind of comment makes me crazy.
You notate it as 2/2 because MUSICIANS PLAY IT DIFFERENTLY THAN
THE PLAY 2/4.
Certain styles of music make more sense in 2/2 than they would in
4/4 or 2/4.
You can really hear a difference in music performed in 2/4 rather
than 2/2? Come on, now, put yourself in an audience and write the
meters down that you hear, and I'll be that your movements in 2
will be correct half the time and wrong half the time, assuming
you've never seen the printed music before.
What's the performing difference when dividing the beat in half, if
using a half-note pulse and playing quarter notes or using a
quarter-note pulse and playing 8th notes? A beat divided in half
is a beat divided in half. Isn't it?
I know what he means, if I could jump in here. The listener might not
make a distinction, but the performer reading it might react
differently. In a previous post (I don't know if it made it to the
board yet!) I had made a comparison using jazz, where it is easy to
get eighth notes to swing in 4/4, but hard to get quarter notes to
swing in 4/2 or sixteenths to swing in 4/8. Some styles of music
enter the performer's brain more easily in a certain notation,
according to what we are used to. The composer can choose to ignore
these conventions, but he may be putting up a barrier to easy
interpretation of his music.
Christopher
(An interesting exception to the jazz swing convention: the tune All
Blues, which for some odd reason is usually notated in 6/8 with swing
16ths, rather than the more conventional 6/4 with swung 8ths (like
two bars of jazz waltz). Nutty.)
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